MIZNER TURNS MOODIER AND MEATIER

For four years, it feted flappers and fun. But at age 5, the annual Addison Mizner Festival has discovered the jazz in Jazz Age.

Since its inception, the Mizner Festival has been devoted primarily to theater of the 1920s. This year, for the first time, however, the festival also will feature a series of concerts by noted jazz performers. And Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, a drama about torch singer Billie Holiday that opens tonight, also helps to make the 1988 Mizner Festival moodier and meatier than any of its predecessors -- bringing to the forefront jazz's rich emotional message.

"Instead of locking ourselves into the '20s," said Caldwell Theatre Company director Michael Hall, "we could follow the Jazz Age in many ways. In the '30s, music was reflective of some social change -- American music became moody, expressive of some very deep feelings, unlike the '20s, which were that boop-boop-be-doop stuff."

Hall and the Caldwell created the Mizner Festival in response to an economic need recognized by Palm Beach County's Tourist Development Council: how to get more visitors to the county during the spring "shoulder season," when Florida tourism traditionally begins dropping off. The TDC had begun offering special grants and the Caldwell wanted one.

"The whole idea started in the bar down at Mama Leone's," Hall admitted with a laugh. While they were relaxing in the bar near the theater, he told his company members, "well, there's money available -- how do we put together a festival?"

From their brainstorming came a concept based on the history and traditional attractions of the Caldwell's hometown, Boca Raton. That concept was synonymous with architect Addison Mizner, whose barrel-tiled, Spanish- Mediterranean building style and extensive land holdings shaped Boca into a distinctive playground for the rich in the 1920s. The Mizner Festival was thus envisioned as a celebration of that era and of things unique to Boca and Palm Beach County.

Naturally enough, Mizner fest events always have centered around a Caldwell mainstage production, usually of some insouciant, Jazz Age comedy such as last year's The Women, by Clare Booth Luce. The festival also routinely schedules a cabaret revue of period tunes, and discussions, tours or exhibits on Mizneriana.

There is that and more this year. Now funded by a $100,000 TDC matching grant, the Mizner's general program includes the 23 Skidoo revue, which features a retrospective on radio shows, and Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill. Starring Jackie Lowe as Billie Holiday, this one-woman drama explores the life of a troubled but brilliant artist whose music both expressed and salved her pain.

"The film Lady Sings the Blues was a kind of glamorized version" of the singer, Hall noted. "This is more about the real lady."

Among the other usual events, this year's three-day Mizner Symposium began Thursday with restoration and crafts experts discussing the impact on architecture of Mizner's designs and the building materials his company used to manufacture.

But the Caldwell also has been allotted an extra $35,000 by the TDC to bring legendary jazz singer Sarah Vaughan and the Count Basie Orchestra to Boca on April 23. The Vaughan concert helps glorify Jazz Etc., a tourist marketing brochure devised by the Palm Beach County Council of the Arts to cross-list all the spring jazz events at the Palm Beach, SunFest and Mizner festivals. The grant also has helped the Caldwell expand the Mizner's artistic scope.

In fact, the Caldwell has been recommended for $150,000 in TDC money for next year's Mizner Festival, which would give the project one of the biggest slices of the TDC's pie.

Why does the Mizner receive so much of the TDC's available support? "It is one of the most administratively stable and dependable festivals in the county," said Will Ray, executive director of the Palm Beach County arts council, which administers the TDC grants. "It was the one festival created to answer the arts council's initiative to fill in the shoulder season. It does nothing but good."

The new jazz components may add what Ray thinks is a needed and attractive diversity to the festival. Besides Vaughan, the festival will feature Copeland Davis and Trio, Alice Day and Friends and the Dick Cully Big Band, all in free outdoor concerts at Boca Raton's Sanborn Square.

Expanding to include the jazz of the '30s has given the festival deeper artistic sources to draw on, Hall believes.

"It gave me a theme to follow that I think is sort of interesting," Hall explained. "It makes the festival more unified and a bit more serious."

Now that music has become a good part of the Mizner, Hall foresees future festivals concentrating on the work of composers such as George Gershwin or Jerome Kern. "I'd like to sort of have a theme each year," he said.

But Addison Mizner always will be the festival's rallying figure, its symbol of Palm Beach County's high-society past and bright future.

The Mizner Festival "has been the only vehicle in Palm Beach County that has brought people together to talk about historic preservation," said John Johnson, director of the Historic Palm Beach County Preservation Board, which co-sponsors the Mizner Symposium. "History, architecture are parts of our culture and many people in South Florida really don't think about there being a history here."

Lest education, the economy and artistic significance give the Mizner too somber an image, Hall can point to anything on its schedule and promise a good time. Even Lady Day, which is making its Florida debut at the festival, will remind audiences that entertainment is a Mizner industry.

"This is very definitely a mood piece, but it's by no means a downer," Hall said. "I thought it was dynamite theater -- a real departure from anything we've done before."

ADDISON MIZNER FESTIVAL

-- What: The Addison Mizner Festival, a five-week celebration in theater, music and lectures of Palm Beach County's Jazz Age past and the Boca Raton architect who influenced the era.